A. S. Byatt

“I am a profound pessimist both about life and about human relations and about politics and ecology. Humans are inadequate and stupid creatures who sooner or later make a mess, and those who are trying to do good do a lot more damage than those who are muddling along.”

“I think literary theory has not been terribly good for English studies in a while. It's not that theory isn't interesting, but it isn't about books, or the idiosyncrasies and complexities of putting language together.”

“You can understand a lot about yourself by working out which fairytale you use to present your world to yourself in.”

“The more research you do, the more at ease you are in the world you're writing about. It doesn't encumber you, it makes you free.”

“I think vestigially there's a synesthete in me, but not like a real one who immediately knows what colour Wednesday is.”

“You learn a lot about love before you ever get there. You learn at least as much about love from books as you do from watching your parents.”

“If a novelist tells you something she knows or thinks, and you believe her, that is not because either of you think she is God, but because she is doing her work - as a novelist.”

“I don't think it is an easy thing to write and expect to be commercial, even if you are from Venus and a hermaphrodite.”

“I sort of mind living in a time when most of the literature is terribly personal. I suppose it's because I grew up on a love of history, philosophy, science and religion, but not to think too much about yourself.”

“America is full of readers of all different sorts who love books in many different ways, and I keep meeting them. And I think editors should look after them, and make less effort to please people who don't actually like books.”

“Biographies are no longer written to explain or explore the greatness of the great. They redress balances, explore secret weaknesses, demolish legends.”

“I have never been able to read Agatha Christie - the pleasure is purely in the puzzle, and the reader is toyed with by someone who didn't decide herself who the killer was until the end of the writing.”

“I like feeling my way into different minds and experiences. It comes naturally and always has.”

“In our world of sleek flesh and collagen, Botox and liposuction, what we most fear is the dissolution of the body-mind, the death of the brain.”

“I think the virtue I prize above all others is curiosity. If you look really hard at almost anybody, and try to see why they're doing what they're doing, taking a dig at them ceases to be what you want to do even if you hate them.”

“When I was a child - in wartime, pre-television - books were my life.”

“It's because I'm a feminist that I can't stand women limiting other women's imaginations. It really makes me angry.”

“In novels in general - and also on the television - we do live in a world where bodies is what we are. We do not talk about the spirit or the soul, and there is a sense that we no longer talk about beliefs, either Freudian or Marxist.”

“I'm not very interested in myself. I do have a deep moral belief that you should always look out at other things and not be self-centred.”

“I acquired a hunger for fairy tales in the dark days of blackout and blitz in the Second World War.”